Plugable USB-C Mini Docking Station with Power Delivery Review

Testing and Methodology

The graphic part of this docking station works straight out, and as such, there isn’t anything to benchmark here. What I can say about it, is that it worked like a charm in my test.

The USB and LAN abilities, on the other hand, is something that I can test and compare. I will be connecting a MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro in a MyDigitalSSD 10Gbps enclosure and test how it is performing there.

Then I’ll disconnect the docking station and connect the drive directly to the system for another test. That should give us a great view on performance impact happening from the docking station if any. We should expect some fluctuations here as the uplink can’t handle all the downlinks at once. We will see how big of an impact on the next pages.

The network connection is the second thing that I can test and compare, and in a very similar way to the USB testing. Naturally, I won’t be using my SSD here but rather connect the system to the LAN port on the docking station and run both TCP and UDP network benchmarks there. When those are done,   I’ll connect it my onboard LAN controller instead and run the same benchmarks.

Test system

• Gigabyte X170-Extreme ECC
• Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5
• Crucial Ballistix DDR4 2400 MHz (4x 8GB) UDIMM
• EVGA SC GTX980
• Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 1200W
• Noctua NH-D15S

Software

• Anvil’s Storage Benchmark
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Disk Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark Benchmark
• PassMark PerformanceTest Suite
• Windows 10 Pro